Monoculture Versus Biodiversity: Holiness and Creation part 1

We have had a problem in this world for the last 75 years or so. Farming has left the family behind and the families that used to farm have left farming behind for lies of a future in the big cities. This was a part of the cause of monoculture farming and so-called agribusiness. The other part has been the blind allegiance that modernity has given to science.

Now, don’t hear what I’m not saying. I happen to love science. I think it is important in a lot of what we do, maybe most or all. However, blind allegiance to anything/one is just that, blind. I believe that Norman Borlaug was one of the most important (if not THE most important) people of the 20th Century. He, through genetically modified engineering of wheat and corn, saved a billion (literally) people in Africa, India, and Mexico by the time I was born. The problem is that GMOs are not sustainable. They have served their purpose and now they have moved beyond helpful and now circled around to destructive.

How could they be destructive when GMOs helped so many people? That’s a great question. The problem with GMOs is that they push out diversity in favor of monoculture. Because of corporate interests, companies like Monsanto and Cargill reduce the GMO to its minimum destroying diversity that God initiated at creation.

Genesis 1 is not merely some creation myth to aline ourselves with. It is a bird’s eye view into the heart of God. It begins with chaos and singularity (or if your not reading it closely enough it begins with nothing) and God begins to speak division. It moves from singularity to light and a diversity of light and darkness. Then, from light and darkness to sky and water. God divides water from land. From there God divides the kinds of light, separating the sun, moon, and stars. Then, God continues to diversify creation with fish and birds. Continuing diversity God creates creatures on land and humankind. Finally God creates a division in time, creating Sabath.

God moves from the monoculture of darkness and chaos to the biodiversity that is all of creation. Yet, here in the age of confusion folks decide we can do a lot better by reducing the diversity of God to monoculture in GMOs. It’s like We think we know better.

So the question is: what happens when (not if) the 90% of corn and soy in the world (Monsanto) is GMOed to a single kind of seed and becomes susceptible to a disease or insect that because of the GMO culture is indestructible? Suddenly, the biodiversity with which God created becomes unbalanced. The perfect mobile of creation is off kilter, much as it is with sin, humankind’s way of dealing with God’s biodiversity.

The call to holiness is a call to return to God’s creation of diversity. I will post about holiness in the next few days to move these thoughts along.